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“Time for a Change”: Loan conditions and bank behavior when firms switch banks

This paper studies loan conditions when firms switch banks. Recent theoretical work on bank–firm relationships motivates our matching models. The dynamic cycle of the loan rate that we uncover is as follows: a loan granted by a new (outside) bank carries a loan rate that is significantly lower than the rates on comparable new loans from the firm's current (inside) banks. The new...

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English / 01/10/2010

When Organization Theory Met Business Ethics. Towards Further Symbiosis

Organization theory and business ethics are essentially the positive and normative sides of the very same coin, reflecting on how human cooperative activities are organized
and how they ought to be organized respectively. It is therefore unfortunate that—due to the relatively impermeable manmade boundaries segregating the corresponding scholarly communities into separate...

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English / 01/10/2010

Evaluations: hidden costs, questionable benefits and superior alternatives

Research evaluation is praised as the symbol of modern quality management. We claim firstly, performance evaluations in research have higher costs than normally assumed, because the evaluated persons and institutions systematically change their behavior and develop counter strategies. Moreover, intrinsic work motivation is crowded out and undesired lock-in effects take place....

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English / 01/10/2010

Risk-type concentration and efficiency incentives: a challenge for the risk adjustment formula

An important goal of risk-adjusted capitation payments (RACPs) to competitive community-rated health plans-that may differ in coverage and/or the organisation of delivering care-is to reduce incentives for risk selection while maintaining incentives for efficiency. In most schemes, RACPs are simply based on the average observed costs in risk groups (in a prior year). We show that...

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English / 01/10/2010

Withering Academia?

Strong forces lead to a withering of academia as it exists today. The major causal forces are the rankings mania, increased division of labor in research, intense publication pressure, academic fraud, dilution of the concept of “university”, and inadequate organizational forms for modern research. Academia, in a broader sense understood as “the locus of seeking truth and learning...

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English / 01/10/2010

Awards as Signals

Awards are widespread in all countries and are prevalent both in the public sphere and in the private sector. This paper argues, and empirically supports, that awards serve public functions and economists should take them seriously. Using a unique cross-country data set, we suggest that awards serve as signals. Awards are more prevalent the more difficult the position and status of...

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English / 01/10/2010

Democracy and Innovation

Self-determination in politics has become the ideal everybody accepts. This paper argues that such contentment undermines the very idea of democracy. Democracy should be open to criticism and change. Two possible developments are considered:
(a) More political power should be given to the citizens. Direct democracy is the appropriate form of democracy for the 21st century....

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English / 01/10/2010

Robust Performance Hypothesis Testing with the Variance

"Applied researchers often test for the difference of the variance of two investment strategies; in particular, when the investment strategies under consideration aim to implement the global minimum variance portfolio. A popular tool to this end is the F-test for the equality of variances. Unfortunately, this test is not valid when the returns are correlated, have tails heavier...

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English / 01/10/2010

Impact of Specialization on Health Outcomes - Evidence from U.S. Cancer Data

There have been many studies of the volume-outcome relationship. In all of these, the unit of analysis is the hospital or physician. However, this level of analysis is mostly limited to the use of in-hospital mortality rates and is particularly sensitive to selective referral. Moreover, the literature on agglomeration economies highlights the importance of information spillovers...

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English / 01/10/2010

Spurious correlation in estimation of the health production function: A note

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious
correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note
first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to detect and avoid spurious correlation. It then applies it to a
recent...

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English / 28/09/2010

Financial Market Equilibria with Cumulative Prospect Theory

The paper first shows that financial market equilibria need not to exist if agents possess cumulative prospect theory preferences with piecewise-power value functions. This is due to the boundary behavior of the cumulative prospect theory value function, which might cause an infinite short-selling problem. But even when a nonnegativity constraint on final wealth is added, non-...

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English / 20/09/2010

Incomplete Observations and Constructed Relevance: A Framework for the Assessment and Management of Corporate Sustainability

In this paper I argue that the assessment and management of corporate sustainability potentially runs the risk of severe biases due to the application of inadequate criteria. Firstly, present praxis as well as theory of corporate sustainability assessment tend to not distinguish between structural and performance related features relevant for corporate sustainability. Secondly, the...

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English / 17/09/2010

Does culture affect the choice of control strategy? - An exploratory study

This paper examines how control strategy varies and to what extent the relationship between control modes and perceived effectiveness of control strategy is shaped by cultural dimensions. Based on the statistical analysis of empirical data from IT sector in six countries, we find that the positive correlation between formal control and perceived effectiveness of control strategy...

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English / 15/09/2010

Politicited Corporations and Legitimacy Gaps: Challenges for Corporate Governance

Beyond national peculiarities, corporate governance practice is mainly centered on the protection of investors’ rights. However, this view neglects the fundamental changes of the operating conditions of business due to globalization and the weakening of regulatory frameworks. Weak or absent enforcement of contracts, increasingly unfettered negative externalities of corporate action,...

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English / 11/09/2010

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